Tag Archives: cartoons

So, how about that new X-Men movie? Pretty cool huh? And doesn’t Guardians of the Galaxy look fun? And don’t get me started on how awesome Winter Soldier was. And yes, I even liked The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (feel free to judge me).Yep, whether in movies produced by Marvel or other production companies like 20th Century Fox and Sony, Marvel characters are everywhere these days.

The same cannot be said for the characters of DC Comics. While it’s true that DC is amping up for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and the following Justice League movie, DC has otherwise remained largely out of theaters (at least, compared to Marvel). So, what’s the issue?

Personally, I think part of the problem, among others, is that DC has a prevalent great weakness, which is also one of its greatest strengths: Batman.

As I mentioned in my last post, two companies flourished during Disney’s struggles post Disney Renaissance. One was Pixar, who couldn’t completely celebrate the fall of Disney as they were tied to Disney for distribution. The other was DreamWorks Animation SKG.

For some history on the rivalry between Disney and DreamWorks, check out the Nostalgia Chick’s two-part video on the subject.

One aspect of this rivalry not really covered in these videos is that DreamWorks’s goal to be the anti-Disney seems to have extended to their depictions of female characters. As far as I can tell, there’s no established cutesy name for DreamWorks’s female characters, so I’m going to call them SKG’s (the DreamWorks abbreviation that stands for founders Spielberg, Katzenberg, and Geffen) SFCs (Strong Female Characters). Continue reading →

I’d say most, if not all of us have fictional characters we can’t stand in the pop culture we love. Some characters just have personalities that grate on us, their flaws, or what we see as their flaws, too grating for us to take.

I say “what we see as their flaws” because, no matter how hard an author or creator tries to demonstrate a character as objectively flawed or no matter how strongly culture objects to and hates a character, it seems there will always be those out there who understand and defend that character’s actions. What may be seen as a horrific violation of societal norms by some, might be seen by others as the result of victimization by the same society. Continue reading →

I may or may not have a famed print, lunch box, and some mints in my apartment with this image on them.

In every undergraduate class I took on the subject of gender, the professor started the semester with the same request: “Raise your hand if you consider yourself a feminist.” Without fail, most hands would stay resolutely on desks, and the only people who would raise their hands would be women majoring in humanities like English Lit. And, no matter how the professors would try to explain that feminism is not about hating men or burning bras or changing the spelling of “women” to “womyn” students, male and female, were still reluctant to call themselves feminists even if they believed in the core ideals of feminism. Continue reading →

Note: Some of the below videos contain cursing/juvenile humor. And Hitler.

I don’t know a single person who won’t throw down in a debate over something. That something may be politics, religion, social justice, or men’s facial hair; but everyone I know has at least some topic they believe to hold the moral/factual/logical/etc. high ground in and they will try to prove their side.

Now, I don’t know if everyone’s this way. Maybe I just know many opinionated people. Perhaps there are people out there who are either not argumentative enough or not passionate enough to engage in debates with others who don’t share their opinions.

I imagine these people, if they do exist, either have a lot of repressed rage or are the happiest people on the planet because debates are often either an invigorating way to get your opinion out into the world or vampiric exchanges that suck the life out of the participants.

And if there’s one thing every fandom seems to know how to do, it’s holding passionate, hate-filled, endless debates about fictional characters, places, and minutia. Continue reading →

[Spoilers for Man of Steel, Star Trek: Into Darkness, Lion King, Arrow, Justice League: Unlimited, Batman: The Animated Series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and Young Justice]

I’m sure you can all guess my answer based on frequent references to Avatar: The Last Airbender, Disney, and the DC Animated Universe. But then, perhaps I’m just immature, a wo-man child who can’t move past her adolescence and become an adult. After all, many adults of my age and older automatically dismiss anything animated as something for children that they’ve outgrown. Well, I should qualify that. They dismiss non-adult humor based animation. Characters snarking and making off color jokes is much more mature, you see.

Of course, I think this opinion is absurd, and there are several reasons why I think those who dismiss entertainment that’s both animated and not explicitly for adults are missing out on some of the best TV shows and movies out there.